AWS re:Invent 2022 wrap up: Goldman Sachs takes data analysis, code deployment, and consumer applications to AWS

Large financial services companies like Goldman Sachs need to optimize for time and speed to remain competitive. At the same time, these institutions seek to harness insights from their enterprise data to serve consumers, merchants, and partners better. However, the highly regulated financial services industry values strong data protection and must follow strict regulations when implementing any technology that handles sensitive information.

Goldman Sachs’s solution

Using Amazon Web Services (AWS), Goldman Sachs built innovative solutions to improve agility and unlock data analytics while meeting security and compliance requirements. For example, it launched Cloud Fast Track, a self-service continuous deployment program, to help developers deploy applications at scale with built-in security guardrails. “AWS offers us certain conditions, tools to establish data parameters, if you will, so that we can build those guardrails,” says Shubham Shukla, vice president of Goldman Sachs.

The GS Financial Cloud for Data is a modular set of cloud-native services that help the company accelerate its technology strategy and deliver enhanced financial market analytics. Goldman Sachs used multiple AWS services to build this powerful solution, including Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and Amazon Redshift. Using the GS Financial Cloud for Data, Goldman Sachs facilitates access to curated internal and external data, data management solutions, and data analytics tools built in house, such as Legend, an open-source data modeling and management solution. “We get Legend doing the heavy data modeling, and we have Amazon Redshift doing the heavy lifting on infrastructure and implementation, which is like a match made in heaven,” says Neema Raphael, chief data officer at Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs also adopted AWS Fargate as its primary compute solution to deploy and run its consumer-facing applications at scale. “We were able to run highly secure and highly regulated workloads on AWS Fargate because it was meeting all our security requirements that we needed,” says Akhilesh Reddy, vice president of cloud engineering at Goldman Sachs. “It was also offering the flexibility to fence it with some additional security controls whenever we needed.”

“AWS offers us certain conditions, tools to establish data parameters, if you will, so that we can build those guardrails.” —Shubham Shukla, vice president, Goldman Sachs

Benefits of using AWS

By modernizing key workflows on AWS, Goldman Sachs has improved its speed, scalability, and ability to innovate. In fact, the company can deploy applications on the cloud in minutes instead of weeks or months and has removed the need for manual security reviews during deployment. Using AWS Fargate, it has accelerated its go-to-market strategy while vastly reducing operational overhead, reducing infrastructure costs by 50 percent. “We achieved improved developer agility,” says Reddy. “We were able to improve our developer experience. We were able to improve our security posture by leaps and bounds.”

Using the GS Financial Cloud for Data, Goldman Sachs can locate and consume relevant data in minutes. It can scale to ingest 10 million near-real-time market updates per second, delivering the most relevant and valuable data to its organization and customers. “You get the amazingness of AWS services, and then on top of that, we get the scale of Goldman data engineering and our solution, which reduces the complexity . . . and helps all our data engineers innovate faster,” says Raphael.

Company overview

Goldman Sachs is an investment banking and financial services firm. Founded in 1869, it has close to $2 trillion in assets under supervision.

Check out “Using policy as code to deploy new applications in minutes,” “Accelerating time to value in data analytics,” “What’s new and what’s next with Amazon ECS,” and “What’s new with Amazon Redshift” for more information.

Goldman Sachs is streamlining key workflows and unlocking enterprise and market data insights using powerful solutions built on AWS.